EvoControl - custom Alexa skill for Evohome

[Tall Trees]

Many thanks for your thought,

It has helped greatly. When giving the command with "Skill", Alexa offered to set up the skill and gave a QR on screen. I followed this and relinked the account, which seems to have cured the issues and speeded up the response as well.

I note that it seems to have reset the skill and a few things look different - there is no shower scene for instance.

But overall is seems good for now, I will let you know if I encounter and more issues.

Once again, Many Thanks

[philchillbill]

The shower scene is not automatically created for you (it's just an example of the phraseology). So if you're a new user it will indeed not be present. Or did you already use the skill in the past under a different account which did have that scene but now you logged in as a different user and do not see it?

[Tall Trees]

Not sure what has happened, I had a Shower scene set up previously, which disappeared and I have logged back in and relinked with same account as far as I am aware!

[philchillbill]

Fixed a bug where using Delayed Start with scene/activity triggering did not cross the midnight boundary correctly. Thanks to Anthony for raising the issue.

[philchillbill]

It's now possible to insert 1 or 2 switchpoints into a zone's schedule for tomorrow if the time you specify has already passed for today. So if at e.g. 2PM you say".. make it 20 deg in the Office at 8AM for an hour" you'll get 2 new switchpoints in the Office schedule tomorrow morning. This used to be deliberately blocked, but as the code for Delayed Start of an activity is used under the hood here, the recent change to that code makes that blocking rather silly. Thanks to Dean for suggesting.

[99Biggles]

I've had a 2-controller Evohome system running without problems (except for errors on the DHW temp sensor, of course) for about 8 years but have always found the App and controller interface to be very limited. I first looked at Evocontrol several months ago and liked what I saw but (even as an ex-IT guy) the jargon stopped me from going further. I've come back to it with an open mind. I have no idea what an Alexa skill is (and Google wasn't helpful) but all I want is an App that anyone in the family can use to change a bunch of settings without needing to understand the tech or to use a voice input. Such things as: increase all temps by 5 degrees, visitors this weekend (so heat rooms that aren't always used for x days), lazy days (change timings of some rooms to something preset), and so on. Will Evocontrol do this? Is there a Noddy's guide to set-up?

[philchillbill]

Yes it will do all that and much more. There’s also a web app that runs in a browser so no need for Alexa. All the details are at https://evocontrol.eu. Setup is just creating an account and then logging in to Honeywell. Also detailed in the web help.

[99Biggles]

Thanks. I'm working my way through the intro, and have both controllers visible in the App, so will start up the learning curve.
Two immediate thoughts:
- it could be helpful to have a help bubble appear when hovering the mouse cursor over the icons at the bottom of the page
- it would be very useful to be able to display graphs of actual room temperature, is this feasible and, if so, in plan for the future?

[philchillbill]

Tooltip hovering only works with a mouse while most people use the app on touchscreen devices. Hence not implemented. The app can display many types of graphs. Did you not look at the website?